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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Labeling People: French Scholars on Society, Race, and Empire, 1815-1848

Labeling People: French Scholars on Society, Race, and Empire, 1815-1848

Staum, Martin

Hardcover

Series: McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Ideas, Book 37

Political BiographiesFrench HistoryGeneral Sociology

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0773525807
ISBN13: 9780773525801
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: Aug 20 2003
Pages: 264
Weight: 1.06
Height: 0.93 Width: 6.10 Depth: 9.44
Language: English

Nineteenth-century French scholars, during a turbulent era of revolution and industrialization, ranked intelligence and character according to facial profile, skin colour, and head shape. They believed that such indicators could determine whether individuals were educable and peoples perfectible. In Labeling People Martin Staum examines the Paris societies of phrenology (reading intelligence and character by head shapes), geography, and ethnology and their techniques for classifying people. He shows how the work of these social scientists gave credence to the arrangement of races in a hierarchy, the domination of non-European peoples, and the limitation of opportunities for ill-favored individuals within France.

While previous studies have contrasted the relative optimism of middle-class social scientists before 1848 with a later period of concern for national decline and racial degeneration, Staum demonstrates that the earlier learned societies were also fearful of turmoil at home and interested in adventure abroad. Both geographers and ethnologists created concepts of fundamental racial inequality that prefigured the imperialist associationist discourse of the Third Republic, believing that European tutelage would guide civilizable peoples, and providing an open invitation to dominate and exploit the uncivilizable.

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